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J053 writes "FARS, the Iranian news agency, ran a story about a Gallup poll which showed that 'the overwhelming majority of rural white Americans said they would rather vote for Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than U.S. president Barack Obama.' '"I like him better," said West Virginia resident Dale Swiderski, who, along with 77 percent of rural Caucasian voters, confirmed he would much rather go to a baseball game or have a beer with Ahmadinejad.' Only problem was, it was a story from The Onion. Not only that, they took credit for it! The Onion responded by stating that 'Fars is a subsidiary and has been our Middle Eastern bureau since the mid 1980s.'"

Most reliable? If you're talking about Fox News, I think you are referring to the 'fair and balanced' coverage Fox News frequently advertises. Fox isn't claiming to be any more 'reliable' for reporting news than FARS is claiming to be doing in Iran. (and If you want 'breaking news' try TMZ). If Fox were so serious about actually reporting news, they wouldn't fill all their prime-time, most-profitable hours with pundit shock-jocks like Bill O'Reilly, or Glen Beck.

Most reliable? If you're talking about Fox News, I think you are referring to the 'fair and balanced' coverage Fox News frequently advertises. Fox isn't claiming to be any more 'reliable' for reporting news

If Fox News was reliably bad, you could simply take their headlines and invert them to find out the truth. In order to be completely useless it actually has to get things right occasionally.

I live in China, don't watch Fox News (or any other American television channels), and even I am aware that Fox/NBC/CBS/ABC don't run straight news shows during prime time- they run them between 5 and 7 pm or 10 and 11:30 or so, depending on the time zone, because running news during their most profitable hours would put them out of business. So why is Fox News unserious for running commentary at the times when they can maximize profits with other programs just as their competitors do with Monday Night Football, Law & Order, The Simpsons, etc...?

Oh, wait, I misunderstand, you are comparing Fox News to MSNBC and CNN who run hard news with no shock-jocks during their prime time schedules like Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Rachel Maddow Show, PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton, Anderson Cooper 360, and Piers Morgan Tonight(*). Oh... wait... now I get it, you are saying that there is no serious news reported in the USA except for CNN Headline News! That's the ticket!

* I had to actually search for all those TV show names, if some of them aren't on the air anymore, my bad.

Few here will believe you. They're so biased against FoxNews (though few have actually watched it), that anything said in FoxNews' favor just flies over their little adolescent heads. They'd rather get their news from Jon Stewart (or worse, MTV).

The trouble is that most people mix up which of those two examples is doing the news and which is doing the "making shit up".

Yeah, an part of the fun is that both Fox and the Onion carefully maintain a public "face" as a serious news agency. OTOH, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both repeatedly point out that they are professional comedians who work for Comedy Central. Part of their status of comedians is from stories like this one, in which people take their stories as fact despite their repeated disclaimers that they're comedians, not reporters. The Onion's and Fox's stories are also mistaken as straight news, although they have always been pure satire. There is a strong suspicion that the people at Fox aren't aware that they're writing satire. The people at The Onion are very conscious of this, and some of them have commented that the most difficult part of writing satire is that the Real World keeps producing extreme events that they wouldn't dared have written as satire.

Disclaimer: I have family ties to The Onion. My daughter was a staff reporter/photographer for them while she was a college student in Madison, and has lots of fun stories about the gang's inner workings. One of their favorite signs of "success" was someone repeating a story of theirs as fact. It seems they often do "fact checking", to verify that what they've written hasn't actually happened. I don't know whether they treat the folks at Fox as colleagues or subject matter. Maybe we should ask them. But they might take such a question as an opportunity for more satire. And on the third hand, if they say that they have friends working at Fox as satirical writers, we should probably assume that they've fact-checked and found it to be untrue, so it's proper "professional conduct" for them to report it as fact.

There's a lot of slippery logic involved in satire...

Of course, you're right, the other stations are doing it too... and it's all terrible. That's why I get my news from Slashdot:|

And you're probably correct to do so. As with the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and The Onion, Slashdot can be taken as a good source of interesting news stories. You can then google them and find a number of sources that report the actual stories with various slants. This may well be why the pollsters have found that the people who follow Stewart and Colbert are among the best-informed voters. I wouldn't be surprised if a poll showed that/. readers are among the best-informed in tech subjects, but I wouldn't infer that it's because they get their information here. Everyone here knows about google, right? Right? Hmmm....

Another similar source of good news stories/tipoffs is NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" program (which I'm right now hearing on the radio). They're basically a comedy show based on real news, but part of what they do it tell made-up stories, and challenge people to distinguish them from true stories. They've also had the fun of hearing their fake news stories repeated as fact. I don't think the pollsters have included them in their poll questions, but it wouldn't be surprising if their listeners would come up as among the best-informed. Their humor is similar to the Stewart/Colbert/Onion approach to news, though in a slightly different format, and they're likely to attract an audience that knows enough to appreciate their very topical humor.

Few here will believe you. They're so biased against FoxNews (though few have actually watched it), that anything said in FoxNews' favor just flies over their little adolescent heads. They'd rather get their news from Jon Stewart (or worse, MTV).

I watch it every morning at breakfast - it's on at the restaurant I go to. It's infotainment at best, and a little unintentionally funny. Especially entertaining are interviews with super Patriots like Ted Nugent and Hank Williams Junior.

But that isn't even the main issue, even if they never ask why Nugent defecated and urinated in his cloths for an extended period of time and went to his draft physical that way to gain a deferment. Or how that makes him an uber patriot now.

Actually, it is true that many people take Steven Colbert and John Stewart more seriously since they are true comedians, who know that the best humor has a significant element of truth in it. You can watch it and see where the humor is while still getting real news. You can't really say the same about Fox.

Polls show those who watch John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are more properly and successfully informed than those who watch the rest of this political hocome. I myself enjoy a laugh or two while realizing we're all fucked.

A lot of what happens in the U.S. appears to be satire. I along with a lot of people got taken in by the Romney airplane window thing. We've heard so many odd things from senior politicians and candidates that it's really not easy to discern the poes from the nutters. The U.S. has elected officials wasting time trying to push creationism in to the science class, obsession with abstinence only education, and this odd idea that universal health care is synonymous with Bolshevism.

Not saying we're perfect though. We have homeopathy and other crazy shit coming out of our earholes. We have vaccine denialism, denial of climate change, people who function daily in a modern society while still believing that an invisible guy in the sky is listening to their heaven-sent words, and organic/natural products being fetishised.

We have a Daily Mail led army of middle aged white guys, simultaneously angry and despondent, because immigrants and queers are giving their houses cancer. Had a discussion the other night with a long-term Daily Mail reader, and it was a Gish gallop of nonsense and generalisations. Not a good sign when someone hurls vitriol at a group called "them", without taking the time to clarify membership of this group (i.e. "pakis"), it's pretty clear that the Mail is strong in them. Fun fact: The reason why crime is running out of control in the UK (despite statistics showing a long trend of decline), is that police recruitment is focussing too much on gays and women, and should instead only have tall straight men (presumably white) on the beat.

A lot of this stuff doesn't really surface in public debate. A politician in the UK claiming that pregnancy resulting from rape probably isn't legitimate rape would be retiring to spend time with the family. The UK is generally secular, and religion tends to be more a personal and understated thing, so a politician pushing to have Jewish myths taught as science would largely be dismissed as some kind of nutter. In the U.S. there seems to be more support available for the extreme views. I'm writing as an outside, so do please correct me if I'm wrong here.

so a politician pushing to have Jewish myths taught as science would largely be dismissed as some kind of nutter.

Don't mistake those creationist nutjobs for having anything to do with Jewish people or mythology, beyond the general historical links between Christianity and Judaism. There is absolutely no relationship, and I have never heard anyone call them 'Jewish myths' before. And I actually know some people who are creationists (but otherwise fairly normal). Is that a British thing? It seems that the British media is generally somewhat anti-Semitic [honestreporting.com]. Jewish people in general are very pro-science.

Very true, thanks for clarifying that. The scripture is common to them, but taken very differently. One of the things I like about Judaeism is the culture of examination of the texts. Kind of amusing though how they seem to spend a great deal of time finding loopholes.

One of the things I like about Judaeism is the culture of examination of the texts. Kind of amusing though how they seem to spend a great deal of time finding loopholes.

This can work both ways. One of the more fun parts of the biblical dietary rules is that, while it's forbidden in general to eat invertebrates, there is a specific "loophole" listed in two places that allows eating Orthoptera (grasshoppers, locusts, etc.). What you do is ask someone who believes in such things whether they eat shrimp or crayfish or lobster. If they say they do, you ask if they eat grasshoppers or locusts or katydids. They'll probably look at you in disgust, and say "Of course not."

Humans don't eat insects much? I don't know where you live, but you need to get out more. In Mexico City there are huge sacks of grasshoppers for sale in the markets, and in Korea silkworm pupae (is that an insect? maybe I'm stretching it) is a common snack and sold everywhere.

Yeah; I'm familiar with a lot of those examples of humans eating insects. But, as far as I've read, it's still true that most humans don't eat insects much. That is, even in places where insects are routinely eaten, they don't seem to actually make up very much of the local human diet. Are there any groups of people who get more than, say, 10% of their calories (or protein) from insect? If so, it could be interesting to read about them.

Don't mistake those creationist nutjobs for having anything to do with Jewish people or mythology, beyond the general historical links between Christianity and Judaism. There is absolutely no relationship, and I have never heard anyone call them 'Jewish myths' before. And I actually know some people who are creationists (but otherwise fairly normal). Is that a British thing?

No - or at least, I've never heard anyone refer to them that way here.

No, I wouldn't say that's true. Certainly there exist publications with a whole range of different slants on the Palestinian question, but that's a very different thing from being anti-Semitic. And there's always over- and under-emphasis of topics—and plenty of inaccuracy in general—but I don't think a charge of anti-Semitism is justified.

The bulk of the books covering creation come from Jewish scripture, so these are Jewish myths. If it's something predominantly based on Christian scripture I'd describe them as bring Christian myths. Credit where credit's due.

maybe I gave him too much credit, but as a white male approaching middle age, I took no offence, because I took it to be a subset of middle age white guys, and not all of us.

His comment was no more racist than commenting that people in the KKK tend to be white. it doesn't mean white people are bad, only that people in that bad organization tend to be white. We know what demographics in the UK and the US tend to fear "immigrants, gays, atheists, and women" and somehow it rarely intersects with those who fall

At least the Onion is satire. The Sun (UK) printed a made up story about Japanese women being sold lambs made to look like poodles and wondering why they wouldn't eat dog food. Several other papers around the world picked it up and even the BBC repeated it.

I don't know about Iran, but Russian media, for example, routinely prints commentary on various Fox News stories, running along the lines of "See how we told you those crazy Yanks really want to kill us all and rape our women? They say so themselves!".

Fars news is owned by Iran's revolutionaty Guard, and is Iranian government's biggest propaganda tool.
This website was among the many other government driven sources which anounced Ahmadinejad's "victory" 3 hours before the polls were over...

Fox news can't put a gun to your head and threaten to shoot you if you don't vote right.

Of course not. What Fox News does is perform a service.

There is a group of people who have some features in common. They intensely desire validation of their views, and they really dislike hearing anything that does not reflect their views. While everyone likes their views validated, the force is strong in these folks. When this group hears or sees a story that they don't like, or distresses their self validation, the reaction is to condemn the people making the story. That is usually the "liberal media".

Perhaps you missed it in 1994 when the polls closed and they went to woman-in-the-street Gwen Eiffel who immediately announced the Democrats were off to a strong evening...as the Republicans took control of the House for the first time in over 30,000 years.

As a matter of fact, iranian press is not doing as bad as you might imagine. It's true that after Mr Khatami's presidency (iranian reformist), situation has gotten somewhat worse, but press has a relative freedom. They can't go all the way to criticise the supreme leader, but criticising the president, parlement, and countries politics is not a novelty.

Well, the parliament rips the president all the time so it's no surprise the press is allowed to. You can side with one faction of conservatives over another. Pro-reform newspapers have been systematically shut down though. I wouldn't call that relative freedom, except maybe compared to Saudi Arabia.

It is true, the press in Iran can criticize the president and parliaments and their policies. They can criticize them for not being true enough to the revolutionary ideal. You can be as critical of anything you want in Iran, as long as the revolutionary guard agrees with your criticism.

Only a complete tool would think this is the same as freedom of the press.

As a matter of fact, iranian press is not doing as bad as you might imagine. It's true that after Mr Khatami's presidency (iranian reformist), situation has gotten somewhat worse, but press has a relative freedom. They can't go all the way to criticise the supreme leader, but criticising the president, parlement, and countries politics is not a novelty.

how about criticizing fars?"not as bad as you might imagine". yeah right, it's pretty fucking bad.

Regardless, one thing that most people don't know is that Ahmadinejad has very little actual power. He's just a figurehead who blathers on for the media. Iran might look like a democracy on paper, but the real power is held by the Iranian clergy.

Because there is a section called politics. Also, the story is about political propaganda via technology gone horribly wrong, and the Onion is a website, which as it turns out also involves technology. The better question is why did you think it was important enough to read and comment on, but then complain because you thought that it should be in the idle section?

Those foolish Iranian's eh? What a bunch of clowns? Seriously - why is this news? Onion stories get accidentally picked up by news agencies all the time - is this news because it's the bad-guys du jour?

The BBC [bbc.co.uk] are hardly any better. Whilst the BBC for generations has had a good reputation - in Scotland, the BBC are showing themselves to be a state broadcaster and at every opportunity take the unionist cause [newsnetscotland.com] (which incidently is way off their charter). Over the last year, Scots have been subjected to TV shows about "how good it is to be British" and "why the UK is great for Scotland" which are not shown south of the border.

There is a simple rule for determining if a news agency is biased or not. Do they agree with your point of view? Then they are unbiased. Do they disagree with your point of view? Then they are biased.

Check this for yourself, why do you think the BBC has changed? There are plenty of reports of them doing the states bidding decades before the cases you mention, like their reporting on the miners strikes.

So... why did you consider them unbiased before? Before they said what you wanted to hear? Could it be that

That's just a silly "all truth is relative, so I can just pick the one I like" excuse. Some news agencies tell the truth, others tell lies. Some represent the facts fairly, some misrepresent them. Sure none of them live in a vacuum outside the cultural/socioeconomic/religious society they live in and journalists are also human beings with their own individual understanding of the world, but to say all bias is equal is like saying a person speeding and a serial child rape/murderer are both equally criminal.

That's just a silly "all truth is relative, so I can just pick the one I like" excuse. Some news agencies tell the truth, others tell lies. Some represent the facts fairly, some misrepresent them.

You're missing it. If you tell the truth, and support the truth, you are biased toward the truth; if you do not these things (both), you are against it: that's how that little word "bias" works. One of those "binary" "either...or" situations which the human mind so loves.

You are at least 68 years too late on that count. Iceland won its independence from Denmark with zero bloodshed.

Your number is off a bit, I believe estimates of the number killed in World War II ranges between 50,000,000 to 78,000,000. Just because it was Hitler's tanks rolling over Denmark and not Icelandic ones doesn't it peaceful.

As the world awakes to the games of the few... Hopefully this backfires in the way of enforcing the reality that the majority of the people on this planet are more alike than they are with the few in positions of command and control. When enough realize this, to few will participate in fabricated, expensive and damaging warfare. Adn we all know there are those few who thrive on what is not beneficial to the rest of us.

Someday, they may be fooled by something far more absurd than The Onion, like CNN -- leaving their whole nation careening stupidly in everlasting confusion. In regards to FOX, I think we've been duped ourselves, mistaking a Persian onion for a crystal ball.

Revolutionary Guard: "Sir, we must expand our nuclear capabilities and wipe Israel off the map.

Ahmadinejad: "It's laminated you imbecile."

Revolutionary Guard: "Good point. About that uranium, sir."

Ahmadinejad: "Look, I'm sick of all this primitive uranium shit. The Americans have a giant bat named Bruce. Our uranium can't make bats that large. There's just no way. This,...this bat, it viciously defends the Americans and has billions of dollars, so it will obviously help the Israelis too.

Revolutionary Guard: "You know, Ahmy,..ever since we watched that Sam Bacile film together, I've been having doubts about this whole radical thing. Don't you ever think of just leaving this all behind and moving to Moldova?"

Ahmadinejad: "I've thought of it many times, but they speak Moldovan, and I really have great difficulty with it. I'm thinking more along the lines of Kalmykia. They have a great chess club there, and the Americans don't even know about it. Plus, Putin might be more inclined to visit us on holidays."

The same thing is going on here. "News" agencies see a story they like, and so they run with it without checking. Every election cycle it happens, and will continue to happen forever. No one is unbiased, Fox, Politico, TV networks.

Iranian news agency took a story from The Onion. Now we can read about this from The Onion (CNN has the screenshot, but no actual link). I think that fake news websites have a great future. You know, all that Zen technics: sit quietly and wait until the whole world will change according to the news you make.

Iranian news agency took a story from The Onion. Now we can read about this from The Onion (CNN has the screenshot, but no actual link). I think that fake news websites have a great future. You know, all that Zen technics: sit quietly and wait until the whole world will change according to the news you make.

This was one that was easy to expose. Enough time and the people of Iran won't even be able to research to find that it was a complete farse and laugh at their fars. Instead they will have to simply accept that it is the truth. Or, probably lose their heads.

except that Fox News doesn't quote the Onion, but rather like the Onion, they make stuff up out of whole cloth, based on what they expect their viewers to believeUh-oh: you believe that *TheOnion* expects its readers to believe their stories? The problem at hand is clearly deeper than we thought.

I am always surprised when, every two or three years, someone sends me a link to a story on The Onion. Before even clicking the link, I just pause for a moment and think "wow, how the fuck is that site still around?". I mean, it's not the worst thing ever or anything, but it's kind of like CSI or LA Law or The Three Stooges. You only need to see a couple episodes to get the gist of it and it loses all its steam after that. In this case, you only needed to read The Onion for about two weeks in the late 90s a